Scientia Amabilis Digitalis: JACQ, the botanical collections world and the role of the University of Vienna - Heimo Rainer

Abstract

Collections move digital for more than two decades now. This talk is centered around collections traditionally curated in Botanical Institutions. The University of Vienna houses a estimated 1.4 million botanical and mycological objects of global provenance. Beginning in the year 2000 we started cataloguing collection objects in the JACQ system www.jacq.org and liberated data for usage by a wider audience to a global aggregator www.gbif.org and in parallel to the Austrian branch www.gbif.at simultaneously providing possibilities for visualization of the digitized objects. From the beginning the system was laid out to host data from multiple institutions to more than 40 institutions from 17 countries joined the Consortium. 

The presentation will illustrate the underlying concepts of the platform, show the chronology of the developments, current capabilities and implementation of FAIR concepts and semantic web technologies. It will also provide insights how JACQ is embedded, contributes, and is interlinked with institutional, national, and international projects and initiatives.